Employing collage and pastiche as both form and content, the American painter David Salle has been heralded as one of the clearest representatives of postmodernism. Caris Reid met Salle in his Brooklyn studio to talk about dirty words, the internet, and his work.

Caris Reid: While looking at your paintings I kept thinking about the funny crossing of left-brain logic and right-brain logic going on. Usually when you look at a painting the process is right brain, all the information being taken in holistically, everything all at once. But since your paintings are so compartmentalized, there is a delay, and the paintings are almost read linearly, like reading a sentence, which is a very left-brain process. But with your work we aren’t actually reading words, we are reading images as though they were stand-ins for words, it makes room for right-brain information to slip in, almost as if a sentence could have hand tremors or have its eyes dilate.

David Salle: Sounds confusing.

C: Do you think there is a desire to confuse?

D: I hope not. Let’s call it generosity of spirit.

C: I read a Wallace Stephens quote recently and he was talking about wanting to delay the process of intellect. He wants intellectualization to happen as far into the poem as possible and he goes out of his way to figure out how to delay that natural process. And I think that happens in your work, allowing the viewer to exist in this world of non-reason for as long as possible.

D: Well, that sounds like art. But it can’t stay non-reason forever. It’s a question of how the thing finally comes to rest – even if we don’t want it to. What we want for art is that it make sense, but in a way that is different from the way everything else in life makes sense. This is an argument for autonomy in art. It is fashionable to say that is an impossibility, but I don’t care. When I was younger I used to say that I wanted to separate the name from the named – that calling things by their right names was a kind of oppression.

C: Which is interesting coming from a man who has all his books alphabetized and labeled on the bookshelf downstairs

D: (laughs) Oh, someone else did that. I’m incredibly un-organized.

Narrative Theory (2009) oil on linen and inkjet on canvas 72 x 120 inches
Copyright David Salle, NY, VAGA, Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

C: I’ve heard you talk in the past about early influences before you got to Cal Arts, like the Bay Area figurative artists, and the Stieglitz circle. By the time you got to Cal Arts did those influinces seem passé?

D: The things that were important to me – basically early 20th Century American art, pre-war figurative painting – were not just passé, they were beyond the pale.

C: Do you think artists now are returning to images that were seen then as less advanced?

D: Some of that work is bittersweetly provincial, as in responding to a locale or translating something from the message center. Now that would be assumed to be a good thing. It’s sort of the history of the last or thirty-five years or so. The official version more or less ran itself into the ground, then it was a question of looking at anything that rythmed with what we were feeling. The old story no longer answered the desire for transcendence in the cultural sense – it was just too exclusive to be credible. The grand, “progressive” narrative of art was dead, except in academic journals, where it is alive and well.

Tennyson (1983) oil, acrylic, wood and plaster relief on canvas 78 x 117 x 5 /12 inches
Copyright David Salle, NY, VAGA, Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

C: The word “narrative” used to be such a dirty word

D: But you mean that in a slightly different way. You are right though – narrative was one of the things that had to be re-claimed. There were so many taboos. “Sensibility” was a dirty word, if you can imagine. “Personality” was another. The minimalist ideology with all its strictures was very widely disseminated, for all kinds of reasons. Why does the thing which is the most restrictive become the most widely disseminated? I don’t know why that should be surprising.

C: Right. Well, I think we all like boundaries

D: I don’t. Do you?

C: (laughs) No, I don’t. I don’t at all, actually. But don’t you think people in general do? I mean, People always cling to structures. And as much as they…

D: I try not to think about what people in general want. There are always people who just want to belong to something, one way or another. That’s life. But Modernism has from the beginning been aligned with utopianism. The flip side of the coin of utopianism is authoritarianism. You know, repression in the name of liberation.

C: We should start waving flags.

D: Mine’s in the shop.

False Queen (1992) oil and acrylic with objects on canvas 96 x 72 inches
Copyright David Salle, NY, VAGA, Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

C: I’m going to totally switch gears… Do you ever use the internet as an image source for paintings?

D: Whenever I try to do images searches all this meaningless, banal information comes up. I don’t think the internet has much imagination. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong.

C: That’s interesting, because now there’s a whole generation of artists who almost exclusively use the internet as an image bank for artwork.

D: It is useful for finding some things. I had a memory of a vaudeville performer, a silent clown, who called himself the Banana Man. He was old when I was a child. I saw him on television in the 50s. He came on stage wearing an enormous black coat; a small man with a mustach. He kept taking things out of his coat… all the classic clown props: a giant comb, a trompe l’ouille mandolin, things like that – and he’d pull out endless bunches of bananas from his overcoat as well. Just bunches and bunches of them. He had a little box on wheels, out of which he pulled even more stuff, which eventually he assembled into a kind of miniature train. For the finale he got in the train with all of his bananas and rode off the stage.

C: That’s amazing

D: I remember this vividly, and have told people about it over the years, and no one believed me, thought I’d made him up. But YouTube proved he existed.

C: I like the idea of doing something that seems non-sensical but really has an abstract order to it… and how beautiful that it was wordless.

D: Yes, totally wordless. I remember as a child being struck by the pure anarchic surrealism of it, although probably not in those exact terms.

Strawberry Shake (2009) oil and linen and blockprint with inkjet on canvas 64 x 126 1/2 inches
Copyright David Salle, NY, VAGA, Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

C: Such a captivating image. I mean, it’s such a great story, but it’s also such an appropriate metaphor for your work.

D: Go on…

C: You know, all these random objects you keep putting out along the stage, that seem to not add up to anything, and you keep assembling them all and by the time we figure out what it is you’re doing with them you’re exiting the stage…

D: That’s not bad. Maybe we should stop there…

Portrait by Tom Hines.

Reproduction of these images, including downloading, is prohibited without written authorization from VAGA, 350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2820, New York, NY  10118.  Tel: 212-736-6666; Fax: 212-736-6767; e-mail: info@vagarights.com.